The doom-mongery about the music business is put into sobering perspective by the eyewatering statistics concerning Take That's live reunion with Robbie Williams, touring with them for the first since 1995. Progress Live, named after last year's best-selling reunion album, the fastest selling of the century, is the UK's biggest stadium tour of all time.

A mind-boggling 1.76 million people will see 27 UK dates, eight of them at Wembley Stadium (breaking the record seven set by Michael Jackson's Bad tour). Some 1.34 million of those tickets were snapped up within 24 hours of going on sale, more than doubling Take That's own record, set on 2008's Circus tour. This tour involves 238 trucks, six weeks of rehearsals, a rumoured £15m budget and the Pet Shop Boys as the support band, whose scaled-down yet typically classy performance felt a bit like Michelangelo in to do the kitchen ceiling. It's hard to imagine a bigger pop event short of Britain's biggest boy-turned-manband actually playing on the moon: when an Apollo-style countdown was accompanied by a crowd noise like several hundred rockets, it felt like they were.

The opening night had been given extra bang by the sense that, if anything went wrong, it would be on a scale not seen since Williams popped out for a drink at Glastonbury and came back a decade and a half later.

Prior to the tour, the erstwhile prodigal confessed to a nerves-induced "meltdown". Then the band's head almost blew away – that's the giant sculpture dominating the stage, not, thankfully, songwriter-leader Gary Barlow. So it felt like a bad omen when the band appeared as a quartet, before Barlow quickly explained: "We've got someone else joining us later."

The gigantic metal stage may well have been created from melted down unsold CDs of the former bad boy's last two wobbly solo albums, but pop has missed his showmanship and unpredictability. He delivered Let Me Entertain You and Angels so effortlessly he could have been singing in the pub, not for 54,000 people.

But when he suddenly sang "I've just done some coke and I've shagged a whore, that's what a superinjunction is for", it was hard to know whether he was heading dangerously off message or it was part of the show. Moments later, it was just like the old days. "When Robbie left…" said Howard Donald. "Sacked, not left!" his bandmate corrected him.

Grins and a group hug later, the band upstaged their jawdropping visuals with the sight of five men performing the classic pop anthems that made them – Pray, Relight My Fire, and Back For Good – and dancing and smiling like they'd never been away. How long the reunion will last is the multi-million dollar question. But when the quintet sang Never Forget in front of an illuminated robot so tall it towered above the stadium, it felt like that almost mythical event: a once in a lifetime pop experience.